Word: bleakly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...These bleak emotional landscapes will look familiar to readers of Dubus' three earlier collections of short fiction. Yet there is something new here: a religious sense, largely implicit in previous stories, that is now explicitly Roman Catholic. The narrator of A Father's Story, the last and best piece in this volume, is a devout believer whose wife has left and divorced him, making it impossible for him to marry again with the church's blessing. And he will not do so without it: "For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular...
...side effects of success. Many Japanese fear that they are beginning to suffer from what they call "advanced nations' disease," though the attack is not yet acute. In a recent poll, 89% of Japanese described themselves as happy with their lives. The present undoubtedly looks handsome compared with the bleak aftermath of the war. Many of the men who are now in the middle management of Mitsui and Mitsubishi were babies being fed a grain of rice at a time in 1946. Morita and Masaru Ibuka founded Sony that year by scrounging around the fire-bombed ruins of Tokyo...
...play from being all it could. Brenneman convincingly handles the most difficult role of Vinnie, alternating between the emotionally childish "daddy's little girl" and the cunning, evil woman who twists people to murder or suicide. But her snarling performance leaves the audience unable to pity her character. This bleak production denies Vinnie the final redemption earned by a tragic heroine. The other demanding role, Orin, occasionally eludes Keshishian, as he has trouble at first keeping the war-weary boy diffident and still remaining in character. Happily, the actor warms into his part. The rest of the cast perform competently...
...camera is so kind. The eyes have always had it, and Bowie has always been as successful with a lens as a microphone. His appearance in The Man Who Fell to Earth was both a dissection of the Bowie mythology to that point and a portent of the bleak direction it was about to take. Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, to be released in America in the fall, casts Bowie for the first time in a heroic mold, as a neurotic but noble British P.O.W. in Java during World War II. Bowie is graceful and compelling in the part...
...worldwide picture is not entirely bleak. China, which suffered some kind of drought every year between 1949 and 1982, received a welcome spate of April showers. So too, the worst drought in Australia's history ended last March, when steady rainfall began soaking much of the country. As new seeds have been planted, optimism has flowered. But Australian farmers estimate it could take seven years to undo the damage. In drought-ravaged areas around the world, such problems would seem like blessings. -By Pico Iyer. Reported by Dean Brelis/New Delhi and Gavin Scott/Rio de Janeiro, with other bureaus